Dr Hannah Ryley

My research interests include manuscript studies, material culture, ecocriticism, postcolonial literature and theory, and early print culture. I contribute to the ‘Material Evidence in Incunabula’ database (part of the 15cBOOKTRADE database), and I was the Research Support Officer for the new ‘Oxford Centre for Textual Editing and Theory’ (known as OCTET), based in the English Faculty.

In my forthcoming monograph, Re-Using Manuscripts in Late Medieval England, I argue that fifteenth-century reuse and recycling of book materials were customary aspects of production and symptomatic of more widespread sustainable practices in manuscript culture. This book is contracted for publication in 2021 with York Medieval Press, an imprint of Boydell & Brewer.

In addition, I am co-editing a volume on medieval recipe culture with Dr Carrie Griffin (University of Limerick, Ireland).

At Magdalen, I teach the Middle English paper (Final Honours School Paper 2). I also tutor first-year students the English Language paper (Prelims paper 1), the Early Medieval English paper (Prelims paper 2), and Course II papers. I have supervised a dissertation on Saracen romances. In addition, I enjoy incorporating material culture and material texts into my teaching.

During Trinity term 2018 I was an Ashmolean Junior Teaching Fellow. In 2019, following the ‘Enhancing Teaching Programme’ at the Oxford Learning Institute, I was delighted to be awarded a qualification for ‘Learning Teaching and Assessing’.

I look forward to co-convening the Paper 6: 'Seeing through texts: visual literary culture in late-medieval England' with Dr Nick Perkins in Michaelmas term 2020.

I read English at Durham, then came to Oxford for the MSt in English 650-1550. I completed my DPhil in 2017, supervised by Professor Daniel Wakelin. During my doctoral studies at Worcester College here in Oxford I was awarded the Martin Senior Scholarship and the Wilkinson Junior Research Fellowship.

Publications

20.01.03 Gastle/Kelemen (eds.), Later Middle English Literature, Materiality, and Culture

This article focuses on medieval improvisation and intervention in the production of Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 33, a parchment-wrapped fourteenth-century manuscript containing medieval romances. This book’s limp binding consists of two wrappers, now detached from the book block. Figure 1 shows Stephen H. Shepherd’s speculative reconstruction of these wrappers. The pair of parchment wrappers were made from recycled papal and clerical documents. Remarkably, the wrappers also carry a written draft of Sir Firumbras, a Middle English romance found in full in the main body of the book.
In this unusual and rare survival, both draft and fair copy of the romance coexisted until the former was used as an improvised binding to wrap the latter. In addition, the materials of this manuscript demonstrate multiple interventions by medieval bookbinders: recycled parchment was used for the draft copy, then the fair copy was written, the book block was bound, and the draft copy formed a double wrapper. Figure 2 shows one of those wrappers, the outer layer of limp binding, as it survives now. This extraordinary case study demonstrates the range and ingenuity of medieval improvisation and intervention in bookbinding.

Constructive parchment destruction in medieval manuscripts

2017

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Journal article

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Book 2.0

This article argues that in the fifteenth century, many manuscripts were physically recycled, and that this recycling is symptomatic of interest in sustaining books. In the case studies explored here, unwanted or old texts became valued for the physical qualities of the parchment on which they were written. Case studies of recycled manuscripts, including flyleaves, pastedowns, limp covers and palimpsests, are presented to argue that many books were made (and re-made) in sustainable ways. Although recycled books, and bits of books, have been mentioned fleetingly by many scholars, and studied as treasures or for the scraps of text they preserve, this article focuses particularly on the practices and processes of medieval book recycling. Research into recycled books thus adds to the history of material culture, to the history of the book, and to debates about the sustainability and durability of media today: we can learn from the practices and processes of the past.

Waste not, want not: the sustainability of medieval manuscripts

2015

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Journal article

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Green Letters / Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism

Manuscript books – as the material incarnations of medieval literature – present intriguing avenues of inquiry into the nature of literature and sustainability. This discussion is structured to address the animal origins of the manuscript, and then to move from the heart of the physical book outwards, from examples of reinforcing strips, via other parchment reuses, finishing with wrappers. Manuscript case studies of each of these phenomena are drawn from medieval collections held in Oxford, Cambridge and Worcester Cathedral. This article debates concepts of “sustainability”, reading two senses of sustainability in the production and treatment of books in the fifteenth century. Throughout this discussion, manuscript books are found to exist in a “dynamic ecology of use and reuse”. Therefore, the evidence considered in this article suggests that books and book materials were indeed subject to widespread “waste not, want not” attitudes.